How A Tale of Two Cities Works: Atwood on Dickens's Machinery

Margaret Atwood has spent sixty years writing fiction. When she reads A Tale of Two Cities, she reads it as a working novelist reading another working novelist, watching the machinery, not just the story. Her Rebind commentary includes an entire bonus episode on Charles Dickens’s craft, and its findings are specific: the novel runs on a timeline calculated backward from fixed historical dates, an opening sentence that doubles as the book’s architecture, character names that encode their plot functions, a resurrection motif organizing all three books, and a nocturnal register Dickens holds until the last page. What follows draws on that reading.

The Timeline

Writing historical fiction means submitting to a constraint most novelists don’t face: the events are fixed. Dickens could not move the storming of the Bastille. He could not adjust the dates of the September Massacre or the fall of Robespierre. Every character’s age at every event in the novel had to be calculated backward from dates he didn’t invent.

“I don’t know anything about his method,” Atwood says in her Rebind commentary, “but I’m guessing about what he had to do. And what he had to do is make a timeline.” She describes her own practice: years across the top, months down the side, world events in the squares, each character’s age and location at each historical moment. “Those external events can’t be moved. If you’re going to have somebody in it, you have to know how old they were at that moment.”

The constraint is also a gift. Because Dickens wrote in 1859 about events of 1789, he had something most novelists don’t have: he knew how it came out. “Right in the midst of these events, you really have no perspective,” Atwood says. “So why Dickens is able to do all of that is that he knows how it came out.” The prophecy Sydney Carton delivers in the novel’s final pages was not a fantasy. By 1859, Baron Haussmann was already rebuilding Paris into the City of Light Carton imagined. The prophecy was being fulfilled in real time.

The Opening Gamble

“It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” Dickens opens A Tale of Two Cities with a sentence that holds two things in irresolvable tension before a single character appears. Atwood reads this as a structural gamble: a novelist who knew his audience was reading in installments, in a weekly periodical, had to seize attention immediately and make a claim large enough to justify everything that followed.

The sentence is also the novel’s architecture. It ends where it begins. The final chapter delivers on the opening’s promise: best of times and worst of times, simultaneously. Carton dying in the third cart; the Thermidorian reaction about to execute the executioners; a beautiful city rising from the abyss. “The end has to be consistent with the beginning,” Atwood says. “And it is.”

The Names

Dickens buried his intentions in his characters’ names, and Atwood reads them as a novelist who does the same thing.

Lorry: a vehicle of conveyance back and forth. That is Jarvis Lorry’s function in the plot: the facilitator who moves people between England and France, between the living and the recovered. “Pay attention to Dickens’s names,” Atwood says. “Lorry is a vehicle of conveyance back and forth. And that is Mr. Lorry’s function in the plot.” He is what the novelist Robertson Davies called fifth business: not hero, not antagonist, but the indispensable figure without whom the plot doesn’t work.

Defarge: of the forge. Her husband’s name encodes his role as a leader in the storming of the Bastille: a man who works metal, who works with heat and force. Miss Pross, Atwood suggests, might be read as a cross between “pris” and “cross,” a person with a temper, seized. Carton: a carton is a container. It is also a coffin liner. The name announces his end.

The Resurrection Motif

Dickens structured the three books of the novel around a single image: the buried and the recovered, the dead and the recalled to life. Book I is called “Recalled to Life.” Every major character arc is a form of resurrection or burial.

Dr. Alexandre Manette: buried in the Bastille for eighteen years, retrieved, slowly restored. Charles Darnay: acquitted at trial twice, pulled back from death each time. Jerry Cruncher: literally digs up bodies by night and sells them to medical schools. Miss Pross’s brother Solomon: disappeared into the spy network, re-encountered under a different name. Roger Cly: fake funeral, not dead, reappears in Paris. Carton’s feet against the coals of the fire: even here, Atwood notes, Dickens uses the digging-up theme. “He over-does the digging-up motif,” she says. “He uses the digging-up theme even there, just so we don’t miss the point.”

The culmination is Carton’s substitution: not resurrection from the tomb but resurrection through it, a different kind of recalled to life. “Sydney Carton undergoes a different kind of resurrection because he does a redemptive thing at the end of the book, and the Bible is quoted at that point,” Atwood says. “So he has resurrected himself, as it were.”

The Theater

Dickens’s background was theatrical in that he performed publicly his whole life, and the serialized novel was in direct competition with melodrama for the same Victorian audience. Atwood reads A Tale of Two Cities as a theatrical text: the lighting, the entrances, the crowd scenes, the set pieces.

The discovery of Manette in his garret: “Dickens is very good at lighting,” Atwood says. “If you go to the scene when Dr. Manette is discovered, you will notice that it’s a very carefully lit room. There’s just one little window. He’s got his back to us, but the light is coming in anyway.”

Jerry Cruncher and the Dover Road coachmen: “In this coach scene — you’re right, it is Shakespearean. It’s the gravedigger. It’s the gatekeeper in Macbeth.” Low characters inserted for comic relief because the audience needs to laugh before the horror, and because those characters know something the principals don’t.

The Old Bailey gallery: people paid admission to watch Darnay’s trial, just as they paid to tour Bedlam. “Here we are at theater again,” Atwood says. “It’s a show.” Dickens, being a theater person, knew exactly what he was doing: putting his English readers in the audience of an entertainment whose French equivalent was the Place de la Révolution. Don’t be smug, England.

The Dark Room

Atwood identifies one overarching tonal decision that runs through the entire novel and only releases at the end: Dickens holds the book in a nocturnal register (midnight coaches, locked cells, candlelit rooms, fog and mud) until the very last page, when Carton’s dying vision finally opens the novel out into light.

This is the structural payoff of everything that has come before. The best of times and the worst of times are held together, in uncomfortable proximity until the final chapter resolves them: not by choosing one, but by placing them in sequence. The worst of times gives way, slowly and with enormous cost, to something that might become the best. The City of Light was already being built when Dickens wrote those words. He knew it. Carton’s prophecy was a fact, delivered in the voice of a man going to his death.